


Chip On Her Shoulder

by kay_emm_gee



Series: the kids aren't alright (The 100 tumblr prompts) [24]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hospital, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Fluff, Humor, Legally Blonde AU, Tumblr Prompt, doctor!Bellamy, medstudent!clarke
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-31
Updated: 2015-05-31
Packaged: 2018-04-02 03:10:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4043590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kay_emm_gee/pseuds/kay_emm_gee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt: Bellarke + Legally Blonde AU</p><p>Summary: In the last few months, there had been more than a few moments where Clarke thought she had hit rock bottom, but curling up on a bench somewhere in the Boston Common—wearing jean cutoff shorts, a bikini top, and sunglasses even though it was night and late October—because she was crying too hard over Finn frickin' Collins to find her way home had to take the cake. </p><p>Correction--Bellamy Blake, her obnoxious, arrogant, judgmental med school TA, finding her like this was rock bottom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chip On Her Shoulder

**Author's Note:**

> Y'all should listen to Chip On My Shoulder from the musical because it is glorious and very Bellamy Blake and inspired this one-shot very much :)

In the last few months, there had been more than a few moments where Clarke thought she had hit rock bottom, but curling up on a bench somewhere in the Boston Common—wearing jean cutoff shorts, a bikini top, and sunglasses even though it was night and late October—because she was crying too hard to find her way home had to take the cake.

Another bout of tears spilled over her cheeks, and she swiped them away, her palms now streaked with black because her mascara was running.

_Fucking Finn and his ‘I need someone who knows where she’s going in life.’_

So what if she was a little lost—weren’t you supposed to be in your early twenties? Sure, she had easily flew through her pre-med courses freshman and sophomore year at Stanford, only to be hit with crippling doubt if medicine was really her calling and decided to spontaneously switch to studying art before junior year. Around the same time, in one of her last biology classes, she had met Finn—sweet, funny, reliable,  _safe_  Finn. He had been her rock through all the fighting with her mother about the change in majors, but apparently her spontaneity hadn’t been as attractive senior year, when he announced that he was going to Harvard Medical School and wanted someone who was on the same ‘type of track’ as him.

Read: not her.

She had been so pissed off— _how dare he, he had almost failed biochemistry without her help_ —that she had called her mother and the whole mess came spilling out. Surprisingly, she had been sympathetic, and before Clarke knew it, Abby had pulled some strings and here she was, part of the first-year class at Harvard Med. And she was failing miserably.

_Fucking Dr. Wallace and his need to prove that she didn’t belong here._

Apparently it wasn’t a secret that Clarke had only gotten into the program because of her mother, and her professor was determined to show that she didn’t have what it took to be a doctor. Sure, she was out of practice when it came to science, having taken art classes her last two years of undergrad, but she wasn’t  _stupid_. She knew she was smart, but Dr. Wallace looked at her in a way that made her feel small and incompetent.

It didn’t help that he seemed to have no problem when some of the other students picked on her in class, especially Raven.

_Fucking Raven Reyes and her gorgeous hair and the enormous diamond ring on her finger._

Clarke wasn’t naïve enough to admit allowing her mother to get her into medical school wasn’t swayed by the fact that it happened to be the same program that Finn was in. Not that she particularly really wanted to get back with him, more just prove to him that she  _could_ be the type of girl he wanted (it was principle, really). That didn’t mean it didn’t hurt like hell that he was already engaged by the time she touched down at Logan in August.

Since the very first day of class, Raven had gone out of her way to make Clarke’s life harder. She didn’t particularly blame Raven for that, because it was a difficult situation having your fiancé’s ex stalk him to medical school, or at least that’s probably what it looked like from her perspective. Even with what she had pulled tonight, Clarke wasn’t all that mad at her. True, Clarke hadn’t know the apartment hosting the party was Raven’s, otherwise she wouldn’t have gone, and she certainly wouldn’t have believed the girl who invited her (who turned out to be a conspiring friend of Raven’s) when she told Clarke it was a luau party,  _so you gotta look the part!_

Every face in the party had read  _dumb valley girl_  when she had walked in wearing her beach outfit. Clarke wasn’t scared off, though; she was made of tougher stuff than that. She just got herself a drink and made small talk, even finding a small moment of kindness when a kid with goggles around his neck and his short friend saved her from a leering classmate. Really, the night had been only a little mortifying until Finn had found her and proceeded to stare at her breasts the entire time he was talking to her. He couldn’t even have the decency to look at her face—and damn it, he had a fucking fiancée too. That had been the last straw, and before she knew it, she had doused him in whatever god-awful jungle juice Raven had mixed up and stormed out.

She had been too keyed up to take the T back to her apartment even though she was shivering violently in the chilly wind whipping down the Common (she had been too upset to remember to get her jacket before leaving the party). The tears, however, didn’t made an appearance until she was halfway home. They blurred her vision so badly that she had to stop.

So here she was at ten at night, dressed in entirely inappropriate clothing, curled up on a bench near the gazebo, crying her eyes out over  _Finn fucking Collins_  of all things.

Yes. This was rock bottom.

“Clarke?” A low, concerned voice asked from behind her, unfortunately also all too familiar.

Apparently the universe hated her, because now  _this_ was rock bottom: crying in the middle of the Common in a bikini and being found by Bellamy Blake.

“Hi,” she hiccupped out, because even though she would rather be back at the party than talking to her obnoxious, arrogant, judgmental TA right now, she wasn’t  _rude_. She refused to look at him though, staring straight ahead at the expanse of grass even as he stepped up to the side of the bench. From the corner of her eye, she could just make out that he was wearing scrubs, and she guessed he was probably on his way home from his shift at the hospital.

“You know, you can skate on the Frog Pond in a few months I’d guess, but swimming any time of the year is definitely off limits, just so you know.”

Clarke choked out a laugh. Usually the only tone she heard coming from Bellamy was disdain or sarcasm as he tore her and her classmates apart during study sessions, but there was a kindness in the way that he spoke to her now that made her turn her head. He was smiling, dark brown curls everywhere, looking somewhere between amused and confused.

“Damn,” she said, giving him a wobbly smile back. “They should post that somewhere.”

“Glad I caught you then.”

She slid him another look as he shifted awkwardly, adjusting the strap of his messenger bag. Then a shiver racked her frame, and he sighed.

“Cali girl, where’s your coat?” He asked wryly as he pulled a sweatshirt out of his bag.

Clarke scowled at him, refusing to take it until Bellamy waved it at her quite insistently, scowling back as he said, “You want me to quiz you on how many different ways you can sick from being exposed to cold? Pneumonia, sinus infection, hypothermia—”

“Do you ever give it a rest?” She grumbled as she took it from him, pulling it on while at the same time trying not to get her smudged makeup on it. When her head popped back out, she saw Bellamy had taken a seat next to her on the bench.

“And for the record,” she added with a sniff. “I do have a coat. I just forgot it.”

“Like you forgot to study for your last test?”

“I did study! It’s not my fault Wallace hates me.”

“Clarke, you barely passed. And I was the one who graded the tests, by the way, and trust me, I don’t hate you. You just didn’t study.”

“I did study,” Clarke repeated meekly, curling in on herself again because she was embarrased. She  _had_  studied, so hard, but she was two years out of practice with this stuff. And to make matters worse, Raven had been sitting in front of her during the exam, the glimmer of her ring too distracting for Clarke to actually focus on her answers.

Her eyes suddenly burned, and tears started to well up again. She wasn’t this girl—she didn’t fail at school because of a boy, and she didn’t get jealous. She hated that all Bellamy saw was this mess of a person she had become: a spoiled, airheaded brat who had used her family connections to take the place of someone who probably actually deserved to be here.

“Hey, hey,” Bellamy murmured, his voice heartbreakingly soft as he squeezed her upper arm reassuringly. “It isn’t the end of the world. You can fix this—plenty of students struggle during their first semester of med school.”

“I don’t,” she sobbed. “I’m not—I’m  _smart_ , okay? Really smart. I went to Stanford, for god sakes. I just—I don’t know. Things have been screwed up ever since Finn broke up with me, and I was just so  _mad_  and wanted to prove to him that I  _did_  have drive and could hack it as a doctor. I mean, jesus, I’m the one who got him through his pre-med classes. He was useless at orgo, and don’t even get me started on how he almost failed genetics. Genetics! Fucking Punnett squares stumped him.  _Idiot_ ,” she hissed, her rage at her ex-boyfriend overtaking her again.

As she seethed, she glanced at Bellamy, who was staring at her with wide eyes.

“You’re telling me you came to medical school because of a guy?”

The shock and disbelief in his tone had Clarke’s cheeks burning in embarrassment, because when you put it like that, yeah, maybe she did deserve the valley girl title.

“No!” She cried out, narrowing her eyes as Bellamy raised his eyebrows doubtfully. “I mean, sort of. I was always pre-med, but I had been considering art school towards the end of college, up until my ass of an ex decided I wasn’t cut out for medicine, and well, here I am.”

Bellamy bit his lip, his face unreadable right up until the second he burst out into peals of laughter.

“Oh my god. I cannot believe—that is probably the weirdest reason I’ve heard for someone going to med school. And I’ve heard a  _lot_  of reasons.” He continued laughing, and somehow Clarke caught herself thinking that he had a nice laugh. The sound was so pure, so honest, that she somehow found herself joining in, though her own laugh was weak and watery at the moment.

As their amusement died down, Clarke unfolded her legs, turning to face him a little bit more. “Alright,” she said, her voice a little more steady as she challenged him. “Why did you come?”

“You really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“My mom died when I was twenty.”

The matter-of-fact way he said it made Clarke’s heart stop, because she hadn’t been expecting  _that_. She opened her mouth to apologize, feeling entirely more awful for complaining about her own inconsequential problems, but he held up a hand, as if to tell her he didn’t mind.

“She had cancer. They probably could’ve caught it earlier, but working three part-time jobs meant my mom didn’t have great healthcare. By the time of her diagnosis, there wasn’t much they could do. I was a junior in college, and suddenly had a sister to support, because hell if I was going to let them put her in foster care. I was angry, so angry, at the doctors, at the system, hell, even at my mother for not taking care of herself better. Somewhere along the line I realized I could continue being angry, and not make something of myself and lose my sister in the process. So, I chose medical school instead, because I want to help people like my mother, people who fall through the cracks.”

“Well,” Clarke said, at a loss for words. So,  _maybe_  there was more to Bellamy Blake than the cocky TA façade. “How did you do it? Go through college, and medical school, with your sister and all that?”

He smiled wryly, a thousand stories written in his eyes. “It was hell,” he admitted with a dry laugh. “Octavia was—well, she had just lost her mother, and I wasn’t in the best state of mind. She rebelled a lot, but I couldn’t blame her. I worked two jobs in addition to school to pay for everything, because the financial aid didn’t cover nearly enough of the cost, and I needed money for O too anyways. I was a walking disaster. Nearly failed out my first semester at Harvard.”

He shot her a knowing look, and Clarke ducked her head, smiling as she realized the weight behind his earlier advice to her. “But you turned it around.”  

“I was lucky enough to have a decent professor who took an interest in me. Dr. Marcus Kane—you’ll have him next year for some of your upper level classes. He’s—”

“My mom’s best friend,” Clarke interrupted with a surprised laugh.

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. If you even want to see pictures of him wearing a pair of reindeer antlers and an ugly Christmas sweater, let me know.”

Bellamy laughed again, and Clarke felt her stomach flip at the pleasant sound.

“I may take you up on that,” he teased.

As he continued smiling at her, she felt her cheeks warm just a little bit. This was nice— _he_ was nice, and it was making her feel funny. Clearing her throat, she blurted out, “So, what’s your secret? For not failing out, I mean.”

Bellamy leaned forward, bracing his forearms on his thighs as he considered her shrewdly. “You really want to do this?”

“Yes,” Clarke replied immediately, straightening up as she stared at him resolutely. “I really want to do this.”

After reading the determination on her face, he nodded. “Okay. Alright. Meet me at the library tomorrow morning at seven, and we’ll get started.”

“Seven?” Clarke said, groaning a little at the thought.

“Clarke,” he admonished.

“Sorry! I didn’t mean—it’s just usually I paint on weekend mornings. It’s the only time I have to do it. But I can figure something else out, this is more important—”

“Fine,” Bellamy relented, a hint of a smile on his face. “Eight, then.”

“Eight is perfect,” Clarke said. “Thank you.”

Then he stood, shifting his bag before saying, “See you tomorrow, then.”

Clarke nodded vehemently, and he turned, raising his hand in farewell. Just as he reached the main path to the exit, he called over his shoulder, “Get ready to have your ass kicked, Griffin.”

“We’ll see about that!” She yelled back teasingly.

She caught the slightest whisper of his chuckle as he walked away, and she smiled, snuggling into her sweatshirt.

_His_  sweatshirt, she corrected herself, starting as she realized she had forgotten to give it back. As the wind whistled around her, though, she was glad to have it to help ward off the chilly fall air.  _I can always give it back tomorrow_ , she reasoned as she stood, her legs stiff and cramped for sitting so long.

When she got home, though, instead of putting it in her backpack with her books and water bottle and highlighters that she had packed for the next morning, Clarke slipped the sweatshirt into the bottom drawer of her dresser, figuring if Bellamy really wanted it back, well, he would just have to ask for it. 


End file.
